Music Playlists
Today's recommending listening includes grunge rock band Pearl Jam, country musician Hank Williams, folk/jazz/roots performer Leon Redbone, and LA-based Latin rock bank Ozomatli.
Get a free Glendale Library, Arts & Culture Library eCard instantaneously. It can be used to access our online resources including eBooks, eAudiobooks, eNewspapers, eMagazines, online classes, online tutoring, and learning games, as well as streaming movies and music, and more.Try listening to a streaming Playlist from Freegal Music, Naxos Music Library, Naxos Jazz Music Library, Hoopla or Alexander Street free with your library card. Alexander Street will ask for an academic institution, use Glendale Public Library.
Learn About Music
The Music Box is an interactive music education podcast for kids. It is from NPR station 89.3 WFPL Louisville.
Read Music
You can check out current issues of Computer Music on RB Digital.
Streaming Music
The Thomas Edison National Historic site has recordings made between 1888 and 1929, music and spoken word.
Summer Reading Challenge
Pre-register now, the Summer Reading Challenge starts June 1, 2020! Everyone can participate on Beanstack. Log book titles, earn reading and activity badges, and receive personalized reading recommendation lists! Here’s a handy how-to guide if you need it. Get started today!
Learn About Art & Science
Botanical Art & Artists provides a compendium of resources about botanical art including resources to get you started, such as painting leaves and flowers, using pencils, pen and ink, composition and color.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology offers activities for kids cooped up at home. They can also answer all your questions about the birds! If you are noticing birds in your backyard or neighborhood you can also submit your sightings to eBird, the world’s largest biodiversity-related citizen science project, and explore what other species are being seen in the area.
Art & Science Online
NPR offers a great program, Where Science Meets Art, a Morning Edition series exploring the unexpected intersections of art and science.
Art & Science Inspiration - Try It at Home
LA Arboretum, At Home Nature Adventures offer hands-on activities designed to help kids and families connect to nature and all its magic! Try flower pressing and some printmaking.
The New York Botanical Garden offers at home activities to Discover Plant Fun at Home. Arvolyn Hill shows the many ways to explore the plant world at home, with hands-on activities and experiments that show you how to grow—and know—plants using vegetables and more from your yard and your kitchen. Watch Regrow Your Garden, Anatomy of a Plant and more.
iNaturalist lets you explore nature from home. You can start by exploring in your own gardens and then expand to neighborhood walks. Participate in community science projects, learn which flowering garden-worthy California native plants are best at attracting and supporting garden allies.
Journey North is one of North America’s largest citizen science programs. The project tracks migrations and seasons and provides an easy entry point into citizen science for people of all ages. Reported sightings are mapped in real-time as migration waves move across the continent.
Staff e-Recommendations
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, the first published work of artist Emil Ferris (she was 55 at the time) is a sweeping 1960's murder mystery and coming of age story set in Chicago. Ballpoint pen drawings on notebook paper are articulated and atmospheric, influenced by Goya, Daumier and Collier's Illustrated Dickens she read as a child. This is a wonderful, dynamic story that can be read as an exploration of femininity, personhood and how to be and accept yourself in the world. It is also an homage to pulp horror magazines and occasionally drops into a cartoony style depending on the character's moods and
inner voice. This book is a little crowded and a complex read but worth it. -EH
The Year of Magical Thinking, available on Hoopla as an audiobook. Joan Didion’s moving memoir about a tumultuous year in her life is a must-listen for Didion fans or anyone dealing with a loss. Beautifully narrated by Barbara Caruso, at its core this is a story about how change changes us. Didion tells a deeply personal tale with her characteristic journalistic sensibility; she loses her beloved husband of 40 years (the author John Gregory Dunne) to a massive coronary on December 30, 2003, and as she reels from that, she has to deal with her adult daughter’s unexpected medical crises. The repetition of key phrases at intervals throughout the book brings a sort of hitching rhythm to the narrative, and two simultaneous family tragedies drive the action, but it is Didion’s insightful examination of her own mind throughout the story that gives the book its power. -LD
Beethoven Symphonies, Roger Norrington conducting the Stuttgart Radio Symphony. I’ve frequently been asked “what is the best version of the Beethoven Symphonies?” There are many great recordings of the 9 Symphonies and sometimes it is just a matter of taste. The contributors in Gramophone and Fanfare magazines compare many recordings. However, I believe these recordings with Roger Norrington and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony are my current favorites. It also includes an informative booklet. Beethoven died in 1827 and there were some advancements in orchestral instruments after he passed away. So, there are many questions - should we perform the music as the composer heard it or would he have embraced the more modern instruments if they had been available during his lifetime? We now have both modern and historical performances. If you read the booklet you will see that Norrington took a middle ground and does not use exclusively historic instruments. The performances are just fantastic and inspired.
If you read through the booklet and want to know about some of the earlier instruments you can hear them on the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment YouTube channel. -BW
Covid-19 Resources
Reliable information about the coronavirus (COVID-19) is available from the World Health Organization, the California Department of Public Health and Los Angeles County Public Health Department and City of Glendale.
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